Vivek Ramaswamy: Merit-Based Teacher Pay | Hacker News Reader

Vivek Ramaswamy: Merit-Based Teacher Pay

wsj.com

1 pointmyroon56 comments

Since most academic performance comes down to the traits of the students, e.g. IQ and conscientiousness, it still seems like this will be a continuation of the existing system, where you get paid more if you can get a job in a better school, which being more expensive (either directly via private school fees or indirectly for public schools in more expensive neighbourhoods), will statistically draw in more students with higher IQs etc.

So I don't this would help things unless you had some initial benchmarking. And I don't think having all students sit an IQ test is going to fly.

This is an important point to bring up when discussing merit based pay. At face value, I would support a system where the most skilled and hardest working educators were rewarded with higher salaries. However, it becomes challenging to implement this while simultaneously encouraging individuals to join districts with challenges. This approach is essentially the opposite of stack ranking at tech companies where it’s more advantageous to join a poor performing team.

The article addresses those concerns:

'Merit should be defined in terms of the improvement that teachers deliver to their students over the course of a school year. This framing controls for other variables affecting student performance and ensures that teachers in wealthy school districts aren’t rewarded because their students come in with an advantage.'

'The bonuses created an incentive for highly rated teachers to move to disadvantaged schools, and within two years students were performing at close to the city’s average level.'

A component for merit. A component for seniority. A component of base pay for time and duties which have to be done. A component for study. Sure. But we all know this is a mask for attempts to both alienate some staff, and cut costs. It may not come in the door that way, but it's where you drive to long term.

"no, we won't keep basic pay CPI adjusted. the new normal is you sit on below CPI rises, and the good guys get more. so be a good guy, which includes not making waves"

Impossible. First, and the 800 pound gorilla, is that education funding is LOCAL, let alone uneven across states. This cements huge de-facto unequal opportunity.

And who decides the merit function? It could, and already does in some states, include adherence to political and religious doctrine. Merit as in "You're fired."

Education will improve when there is uniform funding for all students, and a reasonable measure of success, not just standardized tests, where in Mandarin fashion, the "best" students are the ones who are good at passing tests. I had a tech work for me who excelled in "certs" but screwed up every assignment, horribly. The same applies to teachers, who work for the merit function, and there can easily be unintended consequences.

Techies (and I am one) are mostly isolated from the real world, are obsessed with merit functions, and have little or no empathy for others who aren't as gifted. And I offer praise for the ones here who do. Every kid is different, and that's aside from the "AI teaching revolution", which I vaguely remember from the 1980's.

Like it or not, schools will be rating the Chatbot teacher in partnership with a human teacher. Complexity confounds formulaic solutions.

https://archive.ph/W3JUR

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